Page 93 of Devotion
“Good. Because that one’s taken. Very taken. The man flew across the country in wrinkled clothes.” Anna smiled.
Jace appeared in the doorway, looked at me and then at Miley in my arms.
“You’re staying for dinner,” he said.
To say I was surprised would be an understatement. He’d worn that poker expression the entire time. “We don’t want to impose,” I said.
“You already did. Mrs. Wilson is already making enough food for twelve and there are six of us.” He looked at Miley, then at me. “Take your wife inside. She’s shivering.”
He went back to the kitchen. I heard him pat Caleb on the shoulder as he passed. “You’ll be fine, kid.”
I looked down at Miley. She looked up at me. Her face was a disaster. Tears, red eyes, nose running. Her hair was in a ponytail that had given up.
“How did you even know where I was?” she whispered.
“Trisha. She can find anyone once her heart is set on it. Nobody’s safe.”
She laughed, pressing her forehead against my chest, and my arms wrapped around her instinctively.
I was never letting her go again.
We went inside. Mrs. Wilson handed me a plate before I could introduce myself. Mr. Wilson shook my hand.
“So you’re the movie star.”
“Former.”
“Good. Actors are trouble.” He handed me a beer.
Caleb was polite. Distant. He sat across the table and didn’t look at Miley. Anna glared at me when she caught me watching him too closely and mouthed “Be nice.”
I was nice. Very nice. The nicest man at a table in Charlotte, eating barbecue with my wife’s best friend’s family, while a college kid nursed a crush he was trying to hide. Jace Hunter sat at the head of the table looking at me like I was a fly he’d decided to tolerate.
Under the table, Miley’s hand found mine. Her fingers laced through mine and squeezed.
I squeezed back.
CHAPTER 23
Miley
I fell asleep on his shoulder somewhere over the Carolinas.
I didn’t mean to. I’d been staring out the plane window watching the clouds roll beneath us, thinking about everything that had happened in the last forty-eight hours, the letter, the flight, the backyard in Charlotte where Christopher Vale stood in wrinkled clothes and told me I was the love of his life. My brain was still trying to catch up. My heart had already arrived.
Somewhere between thinking and arriving, my head found his shoulder and my eyes closed. The last thing I felt before sleep took me was his hand finding mine on the armrest, his thumb tracing slow circles on my knuckles.
I woke up when the plane touched down in Miami. Christopher was still beside me, awake, his phone dark in his lap. He’d been watching me sleep. I could tell because his eyes were already on mine when I opened them, and there was an expression on his face that he didn’t bother hiding. Warmth. Love.
It didn’t disappear now.
“Welcome home,” he said.
The days that followed were quiet in a way our life together hadn’t been before.
We were learning each other. The real versions. Not the contract wife and the CEO husband. Not the performance and the audience. Just Miley and Christopher, figuring out what this looked like without a ninety-day countdown hanging over it.
The first night back, he ran a bath. I didn’t ask him to. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, exhausted from the flight, the emotions, the sheer volume of feeling I’d processed in two days, when he disappeared into the bathroom. I heard the water running, and when he came back he said “Come here” in a voice that wasn’t a question.
